Here's what the International Herald Tribune said, back in the halcyon days of April, 2007:
Still, Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy ... Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views...
Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less ... It was a 1988 sermon called "The Audacity to Hope" that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith's power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.
In "Dreams From My Father," Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister's words. "Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones," Mr. Obama wrote. "Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story." Mr. Obama was baptized that year.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/30/america/30obama.php?page=2The Hagee analogy is totally inapposite here: Wright isn't some random crazy reverend who endorses you; Wright is a foundation-stone in the architecture of Barack's self-made identity.
Think what this mother did to this man: she brought him into the world as a biracial American, and then, rather than giving him some kind of stability to find his own place in American life, she marries some random Indonesian and takes him out there for much of his childhood. Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii (and a couple years in California before college) cut off from African-American society. More credit to him, he excels in spite of this, and heads east to the great American universities, and then, as a young man, makes a new start in Chicago. Becomes a community organizer in the inner city. Finally has a chance to connect with his black self. And a big part of this purposeful settting down of roots in the African-American community is the fact that this son of international atheists JOINS Pastor Wright's church. Not only does he spend 20 years there, name a book after a Wrightism, get married to an angry black beauty there, etc. etc. -- but is baptized there himself, early on.
Now look, for most people, except I guess for some southern Baptists, getting an adult baptism is a big step, if only for the general embarassment and potential ridiculosity of the whole event. You don't do that unless you're willing to commit.
And this is where Barack committed. This is where this Zelig, cast into the air by his mother, to float on the buffeting zephyrs of race and history and the world itself, this is where he consciously and purposefully decided to germinate, and where this wind-driven seed grasped the earth and put down its roots.
The fact that THIS is where he did it, with Wright, and Michelle, and so much anger -- totally understandable. As they say, there is no-one more zealous than a convert, there are hosts of reasons why Barack Hussein Obama might feel a need to stake his claim to blackness in such a militant soil -----
but such a man cannot be President. You don't make it to 270 in November with God Damn America. You just don't.
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